A kinder, gentler Huck Finn - SMH

Today I learned about the upcoming publication of a new edition of 'Huckleberry Finn' that is to Drop 'N' Word. "Slave" will be used in its place throughout. Beyond moronic. What purpose is served besides pissing off Twain's ghost?


I am all for the choice of black people to cease & desist use of N-word just as I don’t want to hear it from the mouths of Caucasians. But whitewashing history is as absurd as whitewashing the present.


Mark Twain wrote nigger (yeah, I said it) in his book a bunch of times for the same reason I did in mine. It's called REALISM. He wasn't writing Fantasy. What do you think slave owners called African Americans in those times? How do you think black people were treated? As if they weren't people at all, that's how. If we sugar coat our horrific past now we will convince future generations that it wasn't so bad. When you fail to properly highlight and condemn atrocities, you welcome the opportunity for repetition of history. I don't want my great great grandchildren to believe the Holocaust was a Summer picnic and slavery was a leisurely stroll through the park.


Removing the N-word from Huck Finn should get it removed it from many banned book lists, which is the strongest argument for editing. My alternate suggestion - Complain like hell & if necessary change schools if your kid attends one that refuses to respect Twain's masterpiece. I'd rather a book be banned and retain its power (curious enough minds will read it whether assigned in school or not) than rewritten to make it impotent.

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As a public service perhaps hip hop artists will consider increasing N-word usage from 20 to 30 times per rap song to keep it from going extinct.

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Argument for removing N-word from Huck Finn is to make text less hurtful. It's SUPPOSED TO BE hurtful. You can't heal unless you first hurt. This nation needed the smack across the face that Huckleberry Finn provided. And you know what - It still does.



A young white man reading Huck Finn as written is able to see horror & unfairness of racism, it can help make him a better man. Why dilute that?



Huckleberry Finn is one of the works that influenced me to want to write about race in my fiction. Had I read a bastardized version I’m not sure if it has quite the same effect. I suspect not though.



I include Huckleberry Finn with Native Son, Invisible Man, Soul on Ice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as examples of the most powerful examinations and indictments of racism in literature. Despite my pseudo-defense of her, I'm not quite putting the wit and wisdom of Dr. Laura Schlessinger in that pantheon.


Political Correctness has got to be the greatest oxymoron of all time.


Literary censorship has its place. I was against Amazon carrying a how-to-be-a-better-Pedophile book & against shelving racist Tintin book in kid section. But The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not need to be censored. It needs to be celebrated for brilliance of narrative and potency of social commentary.

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Then again, if Huck Finn remains on banned lists young people may resort to reading Snooki's book instead, so perhaps some language clean up isn't such a bad idea after all.

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"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Author's Notice.

"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth." - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Opening lines of the book

"What's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?" - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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"All right, then, I'll go to hell." - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I'm not Mr. PC...

But can we please get rid of sports team names that offend entire segments of society, most often Native Americans? It isn't as if they have not complained and put forth strenuous efforts through our court system to halt this practice. Yet inexplicably these attempts have come up short. Today the Washington Redskins, a team with a horiffic name inspired by the complexion of a race of people, no less offensive than the Rednecks or the Darkies, won another legal victory in a 17-year fight with a group of American Indians who contend the football team's trademark is racially offensive. The decision issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington doesn't address the main question of racism at the center of the case. Instead, it upholds the lower court's decision in favor of the football team on a legal technicality. The team's attorney successfully argued that they would have suffered great economic loss if they lost the trademark registrations since millions of dollars have been spent on the brand. A number of nitpicking reasons were given by the court in defense of their decision. With all due respect, I think the decision is BS and a total shame. No professional sports organization (or collegiate or any other level for that matter) should have a name that is based on the nationality or race or religion of a group of people. Other descriptive categories such as handicapped or stutterer or suffering from halitosis or wears hair in a comb over style should be considered taboo as well. The Washington Redskins is no less offensive a name than the New York Middle Easterners or Los Angeles Mexicans or Mississippi African Americans or Florida Jews. I feel Washington's football team should change its name regardless of the outcome of any lawsuit just as their basketball team went from being known as the Bullets to the Wizards because they did not want a moniker that associated them with criminal violence. Not a single wizard, warlock or witch registered a complaint to my knowledge. Our nation's capital (of all places) is not the only guilty party, although they are certainly the worst offender. Atlanta also should in good conscience change the name of its baseball team because Braves does not strike me as particularly kosher (at least they have made some logo modifications over the years), and ditto for the Kansas City Chiefs. Cleveland should pick a local treasure to name its baseball team after (the LeBrons perhaps) rather than being known as the Indians. Perhaps people in India would be peeved as well were it not for the fact that Cleveland's team logo is clearly not a person from Calcutta. I'll ignore bothersome team names in the NHL because ignoring the existence of hockey is one of the things I do best, up there with my refusal to acknowledge soccer. No doubt rightful complaints have been registered about some if not all of the names I've mentioned and several I've neglected to comment on [click here for a list of them], and the voices of dissent have continually been ignored because it would be monetarily inconvenient to appease a minority group. Let people operate casinos legally and I suppose you can then feel free to license their image any way you choose. There are arguments that appear to be so self evident that you wonder why you need to make them in the first place, yet here I am making this plea. Franchise owners, if a single person in this country or beyond its shores is insulted by the name of your sports franchise (I'm going on record as finding the Indians, Braves and Redskins to be inappropriate, and for that matter I see no good reason for Notre Dame to have a team called the Fighting Irish because surely there are some Irish pacifists who perhaps refer to themselves as Celtics, so out with that name too), why would you possibly want to go by such a name when there are countless others to choose from that wouldn't bother anybody at all? Imagine the boost to tourism in Minnesota if their football team did not insist on stereotyping and therefore alienating the Scandinavian ancestors of Vikings who probably enjoy wearing a wide variety of hats. This isn't political correctness, folks. It's plain old common sense.

- Roy Pickering (Author of Patches of Grey and Feeding the Squirrels)